When Umpires Play Ball

Teh he! One can be glib when a prediction comes true, even if it’s only half of one. It’s difficult to write breaking news for a weekly newspaper, but here we go anyway.

Dateline Saturday: Astros win game 3 and lead the series 2-1. White Sox go up 3 games to 1 with a rout of the Angels by a score of 8 to 2. The Angels can’t catch a break with two controversial umpire calls going against them in separate games.

The Astros are proving a long held theory in baseball that good pitching beats good hitting. This year Houston ranked 11th in the number of runs scored (687). St. Louis scored 798, ranking 3rd behind Philadelphia and Cincinnati. This season there were 4,592 aggregate runs scored in MLB. Houston had nearly 1,000 fewer hits during the season than St. Louis. Am I boring you with statistics? How about this: The Cardinals have no personality. They are boring in spite of their winning ways. They are the NL version of the Yankees.

Dateline Sunday: Chicago White Sox are in! Houston gets another squeaker!

The Chicago White Sox are a 2nd tier team statistically in almost every category except winning. They last went to the World Series in 1959. Last time they won was 1917. There are a few fans alive that saw it.

Base tries to suggest meaning in to all things baseball, but really the team that is playing the best baseball next week will advance to the World Series. If we were looking only at offense statistics and sifting totals this year the Cubs or Reds and Red Sox or Rangers would be playing each other in the World Series.

In spite of who is playing best at any given time, we see that officiating can have a huge impact on games. We can’t actually say that a bad call gave a game or series to a team, but this year it has created “opportunities” that actually went against teams that lost.

Like the teams in the post-season, only the best umpires make it to the play-offs and World Series. They are the 3rd team in any game. We viewers have a lot of advantage in having more than one angle on any given call. Largely the umpires only have one angle and chance to make the call immediately. Statistically (that again), it generally averages out in the end. The Angels might disagree, but it’s pretty clear that the White Sox were the better team in that series. Base likes it when the Black & Blue team gets together on field to discuss a call. They usually get it right. Cameras shouldn’t officiate.

Dateline Monday: Heartbreaker in Houston in the top of the 9th, but a questionable strike zone may have cost St. Louis game 4 on Sunday. Baseball averaged it out as the Cards broke hearts and extended the series for another game (or 2) in Bush Stadium. Someone always wins in baseball. It’s all still very good right now in Houston, St. Louis, Chicago, and in pockets across the country for that matter. At the very least there are 5 games left, and maybe even 9. Sorry, the numbers are so closely tied to the game Base can’t help but muse at the possibilities. There’ll be snow soon enough, bats will be stored, and this column space will become irregular at best. Football has always intruded on the end of the baseball season. Basketball begets football, and what of hockey?

Dateline Tuesday: Maybe this breaking news journal isn’t such a good idea after all.

The park in Chicago favors St. Louis as the NL challenger. It’s big, and the Cardinals are a big hitting team. Houston’s success hinges a lot on playing half their games in the Juice Box.

Houston, we have a problem at off.base@gmail.com